With IBM Power Virtual Server, Manitoulin gains resilient cloud infrastructure and reduces costs
Manitoulin Group of Companies is a Canadian transportation and logistics organization supporting complex, time‑sensitive supply chain operations across North America. As the business expanded through acquisitions and geographic growth, its IT environment remained centralized within a single primary infrastructure, largely anchored on Manitoulin Island.
This model, while reliable, created increasing constraints as operational scale grew and introduced potential continuity exposure. Distributed teams required faster, more consistent access to core systems, while the concentration of infrastructure introduced additional risks to business continuity. At the same time, maintaining and refreshing on-premises systems required significant ongoing investment, adding cost and limiting flexibility.
Manitoulin needed a way to support continued growth while reducing infrastructure constraints and operational risk.
Working with IBM and business partner Service Express, Manitoulin moved its core IBM® i® workloads to IBM Power® Virtual Server (PowerVS) on IBM Cloud®. The IBM i platform supports mission-critical logistics operations, including financials, payroll, and the company’s transportation management system (TMS), which processes tens of thousands of daily transactions such as shipment tracking, quoting, and delivery operations across the network, supported by scalable infrastructure capable of handling high volumes of customer-facing API requests. This approach allowed the company to extend existing systems into the cloud without requiring application changes, while maintaining the performance and reliability required for these workloads.
The transformation began by migrating disaster recovery to PowerVS, where the environment was validated through a phased approach that included extended role swaps, running production workloads in each environment for months to confirm stability before expanding to full production. Manitoulin then adopted a dual region deployment across IBM Cloud data centers in Toronto and Montreal, replacing its on-premises disaster recovery setup and reducing reliance on geographically concentrated infrastructure.
By shifting to a consumption-based model and consolidating IBM i, x86, and Kubernetes workloads within a unified cloud environment, the organization reduced infrastructure complexity, simplified operations, and created a scalable foundation for continued growth.
With IBM Power Virtual Server, Manitoulin reduced infrastructure costs while improving operational continuity across its logistics network. Moving disaster recovery to the cloud eliminated duplicate on-premises infrastructure, reduced operational overhead, and streamlined replication using IBM Global Replication Services, improving the efficiency of disaster recovery operations. Implementing comparable security standards across hybrid environments was estimated to require more than 1,000 hours using traditional approaches. Testing showed recovery times reduced to 30–40 minutes, compared to 1–2 hours with the previous replication approach.
These changes delivered more than USD 20,000 in recurring monthly savings, along with an additional USD 100,000–150,000 in annual cost reductions after retiring the on-premises DR site—together significantly lowering total infrastructure costs.
The consolidation of workloads into a single cloud environment also improved operational consistency and enabled teams to build expertise more efficiently across a unified platform. With a scalable, dual region cloud foundation in place, Manitoulin is now better positioned to support continued growth, simplify operations across its environment, and accelerate future modernization.
Founded in 1953, Manitoulin Group of Companies is a Canadian transportation and logistics provider delivering end-to-end supply chain services across North America, including trucking, freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing, and distribution.
Service Express, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is an IBM business partner focused on infrastructure, cloud, and managed services. Known for its expertise in IBM Power systems, the company helps organizations maintain and modernize mission-critical environments.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.